


Droplets

by 0Amyxx



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crying, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Levi/Eren Yeager-centric, M/M, Self-Destruction, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:30:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0Amyxx/pseuds/0Amyxx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren refused to bow to the whim of his addiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Droplets

**Author's Note:**

> If you suffer from any form of self-harm or know of someone who does, tell someone. I do not want anyone who is easily triggered to read this. Please be safe. Take care of yourself.
> 
> Also, I'm in no way saying that it's as easy to recover from self-harm as portrayed in this fic. What I'm trying to show is that many people cannot recover from self-harm on their own. Loneliness and isolation, which are signs of this, are not the basis for a healthy recovery.

If asked, Eren would compare the sensation to that of release – the setting of a bone after its distortion, unconsciousness after days deprived of rest, freedom after the endless agony of imprisonment. The mere action itself a symbolic reference to his unrivalled moral standing. Each individual who possessed the audacity to deny humanity their independence, did not deserve the existence they had been granted. And yet, was cutting their very right to life not the most despicable form of freedom denial?

Eren assumed it to be, believed it to be; the salvation he grasped between fatigued fingers knew it to be.

And so, the pattern of blood and steel and ripping flesh between eloquent knives continued – for individuals who possessed the audacity to deny humanity their independence, did not deserve the existence they had been granted. Eren deserved such a punishment. The penance of pain, the destruction of cells which bound his form together in an intrinsic structure of artwork. And Eren deserved such decimation, for he had carried death with him and bestowed it upon the very people he cared for; the very people he so loved. No retribution on earth contained enough strength to alleviate his guilt. It consumed him and the monotonous work of carving each sin into his already healing surface, was a necessity if he did not wish to drown.

Cleansing retribution was granted with each swipe, with each tear that past his dehydrated pupils. And Eren could not stop such purification – he was the core reason for each torn sack hauled barbarically back to their isolation; the walls in which their confinement originated.  Eren agonised over the weight of that burden, his transgressions haunting him in consciousness and in the reverse.

_Drip._

_Erd._

_Drip._

_Gunther._

_Drip._

_Auroro._

_Drip._

_Petra._

His form shook in response to the blade slicing deeper. Liquid anger and rage and frustration and pain ( **vulnerability** ) bled from his eyes.

_Drip._

_Those whose names were unable to be recovered._

And Eren basked in the crippling agony which travelled the length of his ivory foundations – it calmed him, soothed him, allowed tranquillity to overcome the emotions which he so detested. Allowed coherency to return. The sensation shot through him in waves, medication in its finest form – greater than any herbs which could have been administered, any tonic which he may have once consumed. Each section granting him numbness more intense than its predecessor and as Eren experienced each knock of ecstasy his tears ceased, his facial expression cleared of all feeling; his breathing slowing to a mere breeze of its, once forceful, rhythm.

The steam began.

Wiping his canvas clean.

A blank slate in which to begin his vengeance once again.

Orbs of the rarest waters glanced forward, staring distantly into the horizons abyss, its embers of blackened flame teasing him – compelling. Taunting. Taunting him. And for a small simple second, all that Eren could acknowledge was the winds coils against his form, against sharpened leaves of the finest emerald, engulfing its surroundings in heat and warmth. A love known only by that of newly born babes staring into the eyes of their creator.

And Eren basked in its glory –

( _Perhaps this was the awareness he so craved_ …)

– it’s golden aura of darkness, the fleeting moment of insensibility.

(… _Freedom._ )

Footsteps shattered his trance. Crumpled it like moulded clay within the furnace of its transformation – butterfly morphing into chrysalis. And Eren froze, his being adopting a marble structure, weapon in hand, pointing toward the flesh he so wished to mar once again; eyes wide. Almost instantaneously, Eren jolted into action. His redemption flew from the palm which had once contained it, toward the field engulfed in darkened mass; he would not risk being discovered with such a weapon, Eren could not afford for his secret to be uncovered.

They would think him insane. More so than they already did. They would force him to cease such activities. And Eren could not, would not allow that scenario to unfold before his very vision. He would annihilate its manifestation. Irrevocably.

Clawing at his torn sleeve, in order for it to conceal his misgivings ( **blood so prevalent, stained across his tainted skin** ), Eren simultaneously disposed of the remnants of salty liquid gathered upon his cheeks; turning his head onto his shoulder to do so. Preparation for each question the individual may wish to ask was needed; Eren brought up his knees so that they were parallel to his chest and wrapped his arms around their structures. The comfort received did not hold any such weight compared to that of the brush he so wielded, the brush he used to paint glorious scars upon crushed shoulders.

Tensing at the resonance each step created, which became steadily closer than the previous, Eren placated his growing anxiousness and recreated his familiar semblance of normality; his lips became as neutral as lakes frozen, facing winters wrath; his eyes as impartial as night skies lacking the pearls usually viewed within its depths.

He became Eren. And within this personification of regularity, he had no such need for pain. For penance and blood and steel and flesh and salvation.

He was…

…human.

“Eren?” A calm voice asked, smooth, composed. It’s intonations beside Eren and the form accompanying its pitch appeared before his vision.  “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

Eren looked upon Levi’s stature, the shadow consuming him as agony once had – he coughed attempting to dislodge the remnants of fractured baritones.  Barely managing to do so, Eren smiled; the corners of such twitching with its falsified strength.

“Sorry sir, I…” He paused.  “…couldn’t sleep.”

Dull, grey eyes regarded Eren from beneath heavy lids – a multitude of horrors and gore and lifeless bodies piled upon shattered dreams. Levi situated himself beside Eren, gracefully, his movements as fluid as precise movements of knives and string and mechanical arrangements positioned at his hips and spine.

Eren shifted minutely, barely noticeable to the other party present; he did not wish for Levi to view the sins stripped across whitened fabric, and so he buried them even deeper within the outline of his legs, isolating the guilt – shame – hatred. Perhaps his commanding officer would gaze at the stains with the faintest hints of disgust present on his emotionless façade. Eren could not bear that outcome.

“Me neither.”

Glancing to the other, Eren’s smile dissipated and his brows furrowed at Levi’s declaration; an assembly of disordered phrases encompassed his mind.  

{ _He was the one responsible for Levi’s lack of repose. He had been the one to crumble numerous strands of human potential and, even preceding such an event, he had been ultimately ineffective.}_

As Eren placed his chin upon the raised exterior of his knees, unwillingly, sections of the concrete pretence he wore so valiantly, began to chip away with each inhale he registered from Levi’s lungs.

“It’s pointless you know,” Levi said, leaning back and allowing his conscious to intake the blackened scenery surrounding both, his own, and Eren’s residence.

“Pointless? I’m not sure I follow…”

There was a moment, extended yet fleeting, in which neither spoke; Levi did not reply to Eren’s enquiry and the latter did not fracture ignited oblivion – preferring merely to bask in its overwhelming resonance. The former allowed no semblance of emotion to permeate his features; each section was a continuous pattern, a mosaic of imitation from his usual normalcy.

 As Levi turned his head minutely to consider the boy ( _the soldier_ ) beside his being once again, symbols dematerialised the unspoken calm drifting repetitively between each party, in the most glorious of all ways. Fluid silk. Molten clouds; shattered briefly by the edges of roughened words adopted by previous years.

“To blame yourself for their deaths. They chose with their own free will to protect you, and they knew the dangers waiting for them outside the walls – you’d be an idiot to take full responsibility for what happened.”

The dual orbs of dampened grey were exponentially ardent; all-consuming and yet, utterly devoid of emotion. A smoke screen to conceal that which the owner had no use for. That which would only hinder his actions and reactions. Feelings were fickle arrangements. And Levi felt them more forcefully than any other, being damned to a life of constant suicide.

Eren clenched his fists, attempting to dissemble the bones beneath, fracture them with the crushing obscenity of his rage. Though Levi’s words were spoken to invoke the opposite effect, Eren could not halt the small embers which began to engulf him in their searing heat; soul, body and mind. His composure disintegrated before the flames – his wax mask melting arithmetically before the cinders. Each one more potent than its previous. Canines compressed. Molar’s ground against the calcium formation below and within the fireflies of a simple, diminutive second, Eren refused to acknowledge Levi’s status; dismissing it from his memory completely, thoroughly. In that startling second, his Captain was solely bones and blood and flesh. Not unlike his own.

And Eren’s fire exploded.

“Of course I’m to blame, you said it yourself, they were protecting me,” Eren said, lowly – harshly, each word satiated with gunpowder and dynamite. The pressure upon his palms unyielding. “If I had chosen instead to be selfless, if I had chosen to protect them, if I had chosen to use my power…”

His volume raised, the finest yellow beams upon mornings breath – gaining strength. Might. Destroying. Devastating. Enveloping all in their warmth. Halting only when each obstacle was solely ash and nothing more. And as ash moulded into dust, Eren’s voice deflected its flawed destination; cracking and darkening with each inhalation. Each whisper. Each individual shard of empathy.

“… _then they would still be here…”_

Eren’s head fell, downwards toward the earth, dropping as his self-loathing escalated to unbearable heights. Entangled with shame for baring his soul to the very individual whom appeared soulless, the emotion was unsustainable – for if he had to endure the familiar agony, Eren would surely require physical wounds, sensation. Feeling. And it was a process he would not fulfil before Levi.

“Eren.”

Desire consumed him. Rationality. Logic. Reasonability escaped through his skin. Leaving only his addiction and the ungracious craving for more –

– more.

– **More**.

More blood and multiple openings to the flesh he required witness to, more detachment and impassiveness.

Less sensation.

More obscurity.

“Eren, look at me.”

Utter oblivion.

He was human and yet, his humanity was disintegrating into the loathing which overcame his sensibility; he was a soldier, a symbol of the utmost hope humanity still sheltered within their beating hearts. And yet, his hope was fading, despair situating itself inside the familiar crevice. His obedience was wilting. Flowers depraved of light, water, care, love…ambition.

He dared not glance upwards. ( _He was absent. L **o** s **t**_ )

“I said look at me, you brat.”

It was not anger that penetrated his own, nor rage; sorrow. Merely the exasperation behind Levi’s words, the disappointment and exhaustion behind each melody. It sliced him more deeply than any blade wielded by his own fingers could have, accumulated his mourning into one single point of degradation. And Eren shook. Wiping violently at the unacknowledged liquid burning behind his orbs, he glanced back to Levi’s galaxies – stars more potent, life more present than any sky he had come to look upon. He could not breathe.

Abolished within serenity.

“The reason they died was because each one of them believed in something greater than all of this. They believed that human kind deserves an existence beyond that of our cage; so don’t you dare undermine their sacrifice by thinking that they gave their lives for you and you alone.”

Turquoise extended, widened – broadened in implicit horror. Eren’s intentions did not lie beneath the words Levi uttered, he did not accept such responsibilities for selfish purposes, would not have burned each detrimental emotion below the bowels of his rotten flesh had he believed their cost to be entirely void. He had merely been the cause. Eren was not so haughty to revel in the delusion that he had been their glory, for he had not. He had not been their savour, nor had they divulged it to be so. And once again he had manipulated agony upon another, insulted, offended, disrespected and _angered_ Levi.

“N-no—Sir, I didn’t mean to imply--!” Eren stuttered, shock embedded within each broken utterance, each shard. “I know that they didn’t die for me, what I meant was that I’m the one who caused their deaths…”

The emotion was raw within Eren’s gaze, savage and feral and resolute; he truly absorbed each desolate thought which hung from the feathers of his mind. And such thoughts annihilated his being.

“…”

Levi was silent. Collected and still. Grass within fields lacking air. His curious monotony charred the masterpiece.

“How could you have been?”

But Eren did not answer the question, he barely granted any signal of recognition, the only movements were those of furrowed brows and shifting jaw bones and molten lava coiled beneath the calloused fabric of war clothes.

“You weren’t the one who murdered them, Eren. You didn’t make the conscious decision to end their lives and taking into account the fact that they did not die for you, how could you have been the cause of their deaths.”

The statement was repeatedly phrased though, not as an enquiry, rather a statement. A fact of truth and blood, of life and knowledge.

Eren opened his lips, prepared to defend and simultaneously degrade his own soul for the sake of their pride, for the sake of his pain. He required a reason, a purpose, and his punishment suited such a task so completely that it had become the lock to his fundamentally perfect key – his own crafted degeneration. It could not rot. Levi stopped him, injecting his own acid to absorb the metal and reveal golden objects beneath rotten mass.

“Even if you were to have chosen a different path back then, no one can be sure that it wouldn’t have resulted in the same outcome. You aren’t to blame, so stop revelling in self-pity.”

“--”

Perhaps Eren’s reaction should have been an exact opposite to his actual handling, however, a maze of words had never sounded so gloriously beautiful in all his years of existence. They were baked bread at dawns break, bluebells upon summers warmth whistling at each passer-by and Eren could not fathom the heat which illuminated his dreary heart. The colourless stains fading into all-consuming shades of magnificence.  His world of black formed tints of grey and white.

“But – ”

His thoughts assembled their arms, as Eren had done previously. Continually and repetitively. Overlapping the latter to become the former. Outcompeting the light for a promise of void.

“If you continue to do so, the guilt and fear will consume you. It’ll fucking destroy you; and then what hope does humanity have at honouring our dead and surviving?”

Sunshine rays injected their bullets, piercing and cutting. Their wavelengths were soft, caressing – contradicting the meaning they carried. And Eren knew, as he stared in blinding awe at the perfect specimen beside him, that Levi was speaking solely from experience. He dared not interrupt such radiance.

“You are needed. Greatly needed; and valued, that’s not to say your life is worth more than any other human being but Eren, birds can’t fly without their wings.”

Levi did not glance away from Eren’s gaze, merely fought back with a thousand shards of broken glass, intensifying their battle. Pacifying in the same instance while baring his broken strings to the damned. The shattered. The repairable.

“I – but – I thought you were the wings; you’re humanities strongest, I’m just a tool…a _useless_ tool…”

Exhaustion took hold, water simmering behind turquoise orbs of ember. He was tired, oh so tired of continuing and screaming against those who dared confine him, tired of shouldering the world, tired of drowning within oxygen and breathing within blood.

Levi sighed, his own fatigue displayed – burning, before morphing into raw survival.

“Tools can be sharpened; you’re quite far a ways from being useless.”

And Eren’s heart burned. Light becoming established within the very bowels of his decrepit soul, igniting as separate segments of flint did when placed before the other and such luminance increased in intensity as he regarded the human being before his vision. Eyes not consumed by adoration but more a silent respect, a sense of understanding – empathy. The rays fought his darkness and decimated his demons, hope becoming the epitome of war.

A winning battle.  

An existence so valiantly won, that Eren could not recall the sensation of defeat.  His entirety torn and constructed as fabric throughout the helices of time.  

Eyes wide, lips parting, he became absent from their reality, burrowing within his cognitions to locate the reasons he had once so graciously held and cultivated within crumbling palms. For, he possessed no truths. No explanations.  No justifications as to why he felt liberation claw at the binding mesh which confined him. Words became wings and sentences became oceans settling upon valleys of the purest expanse. 

Deliverance.

Waves breaking, crashing and moulding as Eren’s frown encompassed his features and he glanced toward the arm he had once decimated and sheltered with red acid and saline grief. And Eren felt the wind caressing his bare innards. The vulnerability he had so chosen to display. Bore without armour and glass upon flesh.  That which was familiar to him, trailed the expanse of his cheek – untainted and possessing the ability to eliminate all which had once burdened him so profusely.

The tear spread, expanded until each fragment was enclosed by gentle fingers – calloused tips of the smoothest ridges. 

And Eren’s face burned with the potency of igniting stars and scorching wood, his stomach a hurricane of sensations as he became astutely aware of the proximity of Levi’s form. The eyes which so bound him. Granted him the existence he so craved without their knowledge.

He dared not glance away from their depths; clouds of lightning and wrath and tranquillity and calm.

“Never feel guilty for surviving.”

Breath absent, the yearning for bone and the demolition of flesh lacking the intensity it had once possessed, adrift within the steady flow of air.

 “You deserve life.”

And Levi leaned forward, an uncharacteristic display of the affection he had concealed within the recesses of his heart – softly, he brushed his lips against Eren’s own. Eyes sliding shut. A desperate need for such desire to be pacified.

Extinguished into a heat bearable enough to exist upon.

Though, in times of war, adoration dissipated for the display of apathy. Their time was exponentially limited.

Heartbreak and agony.

Deprivation.

Pulling back, Levi murmured his next utterance, cupping Eren’s face firmly within the palm of his hand. A swords rightful place within the bowels of its sheath.

_“Use it, Eren.”_

And smoothly, with Eren’s gaze never once leaving the exquisite motion, Levi stood, stagnant for a moment longer -

( **An endless unbearable second of shattering hearts and renovated souls** )

-before he left – splintering within the flames of their darkness. Footsteps and symphonies became quieter.

Silent.

Empty.

Though, Eren did not feel as such; his fingers tracing the remnants of Levi’s skin. The contact of lips upon the crumbling masterpieces of his own, and he dared to dream. Dared to wish and hope and plead with every deity the ignorance of humanity prayed to so wholly, that he had discovered his reason.

Support in the form of flesh and muscle.

Determination consumed him. Resolve replacing that of the longing to destroy his own being, his own manifestation. And he would not fail.

Eren refused to bow to the whim of his addiction.

He would not fail the individual who had become a segment of his entirety.

“I will, Levi. I will.”

And Eren stood.

Turning his back on the detrimental steel once believed to be his saviour.

Walking from that which pierced his heart and stripped his skin.

Darkness mutating into light, Eren chose the latter.


End file.
